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The Challenger Sale

You may not have won the deal. Instead, it is possible that your competition lost the deal.

You have probably been selling for a long time. Personally, I have been selling for three decades. I have sold tens of millions of dollars of products. If I tabulated it all, I might have sold in the hundreds of millions of dollars of products. I have probably won 500 deals in my career and thankfully have lost much fewer. I have sold deals measured in multiple millions of dollars and sold deals much smaller. My sales cycles have taken years, and they have taken days.

In short, I have seen a lot in my career, and I know that I still have 10-20 more years to build on my success.

With all of the deals that I have done, I can think of many times that I have screwed up and still won the deal. I am sure that if you tried to remember all of your closed deals, you could remember a few times that you didn’t do everything correctly.

This observation leads many people to say that these books are wrong. Since you violated every rule in these books and still won the deal, the books must be junk. Their advice is useless and irrelevant.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that you do not need to follow the advice of the masters. All you need is a competitor that does a worse job than you do! Let’s face it, many times a prospect is going to buy, and they are going to buy the best product that they can afford. If your competition is lousy, you just might win the deal because the competition lost the deal, and you didn’t screw up as badly.

In other words, you might be lousy at sales, but your competition could be even lousier.

There is an old joke. Two men were walking through the woods when a large bear walked out into the clearing no more than 50 feet in front of them. The first man dropped his backpack and dug out a pair of running shoes, then began to lace them up as the bear slowly approached them. The second man looked at the first, confused, and said, “What are you doing? Running shoes aren’t going to help, you can’t outrun that bear.” “I don’t need to,” said the first man, “I just need to outrun you.”

And now you know the reason there is a polar bear image in my header (BTW, the image was taken by one of my very good friends, Don Tredinnick).

Did you outrun your competition or were they just slow? Maybe you should invest in some self-learning and read a few of those books so that you can beat faster runners! Better yet, subscribe to this site so that you can read my book when it is published.